reading remote files

[Dag]

I'm trying to find a way to read (and possibly write) files on
remote machines over ssh.  All that should be required on the
remote machine is a standard ssh server (I don't want to write 
some kind of special server for this) and all the local machine 
should need is path and username/password combo with read access
to the relevant file.

Ideally I'd like to be able to created some kind of remote file
object which can be read by readlines(), failing that I'll settle
for slurping the whole file into a list and then read through it
that way.

I've been playing with the pyssh module a bit, but it's not very
well documented and I'm wondering if anyone has solved a similar
problem or if anyone has a good idea on how to tacle this.

Dag